But detective fiction, by and large, was something he felt he had outgrown as he reached adulthood. In a 1929 letter to Derleth he expresses doubt that S.S. van Dine’s Philo Vance would have much appeal for him, remarking, “I hate these laboriously whimsical & artificially mannered fiction-heroes—they are so mechanical that these lose all touch with reality & become grotesque bores.”3 He does promise to look into Father Brown sometime, though there is no indication he ever did. In other letters, mostly to persons other than Derleth, he expresses less than complete enthusiasm for Derleth’s detective novels, although he does courteously praise Derleth’s Holmes-pastiche Solar Pons series.
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If it were merely the case that H.P. Lovecraft enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes series in his youth and then lost interest, there would be no point in writing this article. The only question is what this circumstance—the early enthusiasm for Holmes on the part of HPL—means.
Essentially, Lovecraft and detective fiction had a philosophical parting of the ways. In 1914, as a result of letter exchanges between Lovecraft and other readers in the pages of The Argosy, Lovecraft discovered amateur journalism, and for the first time in his life came into wide contact with other literary-minded persons. This broadened his tastes and outlook enormously. But more to the point, Lovecraft’s interest had always been toward the cosmic. Another of his boyhood obsessions was astronomy, and it was the intensive study of this subject, together, no doubt, with the experience of staying up nights peering into the depths of infinity through his telescope that convinced Lovecraft that, ultimately, mankind had only a very small, even trivial role to play in the cosmos at large. As if that were not enough, at precisely this time astronomers had just determined that those swirling “nebulae” they had been observing were in fact other galaxies, made up, not of clouds of gas, but of billions of stars, and located much further away than previously thought. So, if anything, the depths of infinity had just gotten considerably larger.
For Lovecraft, then, the fascination (and the aesthetic attraction) was in the vast sweep of time and space. He sought the cosmic in fiction, in his own and in what he read. Lovecraftian horror stems largely from the characters’s realization of their own helpless and trivial role in the cosmic scheme of things. It is as if anyone could say abstractly that the history the Earth might be written out as a 300-volume encyclopedia, and the history of mankind occupies only the bottom half of the last page—but Lovecraft genuinely felt this. As a consequence, for all he might admire Holmes’s brilliance and rationality and the deft artistry of the Doyle stories, which clearly stood for him head and shoulders over most other such fiction, the actual plots of detective stories failed to hold his interest.
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In that same 1931 letter to Derleth, a couple of paragraphs earlier, he had explained, “I never acquired an interest in the peep-show contrasts & ignominies empirically classified as ‘scandal’—perhaps because of a cosmic perspective which felt no vast difference betwixt one sort of inane behavior and another sort of inane behavior on the part of terrestrial puppets.”4 In other words, if organic life itself is to be seen, as Lovecraft saw it, as a chemical-electrical phenomenon which may have occurred briefly on one particular fly-speck planet in a vast and chaotic universe, then it didn’t particularly matter who politely poisoned whom in an English country-house or made off with milady’s jewels. The mature Lovecraft didn’t find mere crime to be of sufficient dramatic interest.
So the matter narrows down to what Lovecraft carried away from his youthful Sherlock Holmes enthusiasm. Things we do or read in childhood do go on to shape the adults we become, even if we “outgrow” them. Scholar Peter Cannon has written about the Holmesean influence on Lovecraft at some length. There are the motifs and the parallel passages, as to be expected, and one easily recognizes the source of the spectral, baying creature in Lovecraft’s story “The Hound.”
But it’s more than that. What would have appealed most to Lovecraft, and remained consistent with his philosophical outlook throughout his life, was Holmes’s rationality, as summed up by the Great Detective’s famous statement (in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”) that “This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground…. No ghosts need apply.” Holmes is making an explicit rejection of the supernatural, or at least of his interest in it. “The world”—meaning the material plane—is “large enough” for him.
Lovecraft, too, completely rejected the supernatural in any “spiritual” sense. There are no ghosts in his fictions. Human beings, who are bio-chemical phenomena of random Nature, have no “souls.” Even in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which deals with the resurrection of the dead, this resurrection is achieved by material means, a matter of “essential salts” collected from the dust of the grave and processed through arcane alchemy. His monsters, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, et al., are immensely powerful cosmic beings, the products of a broader universe of which mankind knows virtually nothing, but they are not “gods” in the traditional sense.
Lovecraft, as quite a small child, was sent home from Sunday school when he started asking embarrassing questions about how, if Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are imaginary, the Judeo-Christian deity is not likewise imaginary. He was entirely unable to accept the “Semitic mythology” in which he was expected to believe. This was an attitude which stayed with him for his entire life. To him, nothing was more absurd than the sentimental notion that any sort of cosmic creator would notice or care in the slightest about the doings of creatures on our particular planetary flyspeck.
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You will notice how many Lovecraft stories resemble detective stories in their structure. “The Call of Cthulhu” details a methodical, inexorable investigation which assembles clues and leads the protagonist to a terrible conclusion. The other key Holmes observation which must have impressed Lovecraft is the one repeated several times throughout the Canon, that once all other possibilities have been eliminated, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.5
Try as they may to avoid doing so, Lovecraftian characters inevitably work out that, yes, a gigantic squid-faced being has indeed been sleeping for millions of years under the Pacific and waits to claim the Earth again, or that there are indeed winged Fungi from Yuggoth in the Vermont hills, or that one Joseph Curwen of Providence, Rhode Island (died, 1771) has actually managed to return to life after more than a century in the grave and impersonate his hapless descendant, Charles Dexter Ward, or that the rural disturbances collectively known as “The Dunwich Horror” are caused by the appalling interbreeding between Yog Sothoth and a human disciple, and this threatens to end the world as we know it.
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Lovecraft did not go in much for continuing investigator characters, but subsequent writers quickly picked up on the obvious implications. He was certainly familiar with such “psychic detectives” as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki or Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence. Dr. Willett in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” or Professor Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror” and most especially Police Inspector Legrasse, who figures in “The Call of Cthulhu” very easily could have, having concluded one “case” that averted cosmic menace, gone on to devote the rest of their careers to such activities.
August Derleth quickly produced one Laban Shrewsbury, who stars in a whole series of Lovecraftian adventures (The Trail of Cthulhu et al.) and the contemporary writer C.J. Henderson has written an entire volume of subsequent investigations of Legrasse (The Tales of Inspector Legrasse). Surely more writers will continue in this mode in the future. Even Peter Cannon, scholar, humorist, and pastichist, has produced a tale, Pulptime, in which Lovecraft, his friend Frank Belknap Long, and an aged Sherlock Holmes actually meet in the 1920s and share an adventure together.
What